


a very strong regard

by ernestdummkompf (JehanFerres)



Category: Gilbert & Sullivan & Related Fandoms, Iolanthe - Sullivan/Gilbert
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 16:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8899951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JehanFerres/pseuds/ernestdummkompf
Summary: “This is absolutely and with no exaggeration the most stupid thing that you have ever done!” Mountararat hadn’t intended for his voice to end up pitching itself up an octave but apparently he was speaking in (rather squeaky) falsetto now. Irritated, he cleared his throat. Tolloller had turned around, his shoulders shaking. Assuming the worst, Mountararat put a hand on his back. “Shit. Thomas? Shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He then realised that Tolloller was laughing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is like...pretty gay. or it WILL be.

Mountararat was beginning to regret trying to drive to sixth form, instead of getting the bus, walking, or trying to get a lift from Leila. Hell, with the state of traffic in the car park, he would probably have taken a lift from Celia. He didn’t know why there were so damn many cars trying to get in, given that he was at least three quarters of an hour early, but honestly he didn’t care.

He did a quick sweep of the car park for Tolloller’s car, and was slightly frustrated when he realised that it wasn’t there, of if it was it was very well hidden. Usually he would park next to Tolloller and then do something to mess with his friend. The change to routine was annoying, to say the least of it. Instead of just leaving, once he found a parking space he sent Tolloller a text.

_george: Are you here?_

Tolloller took a couple of minutes to reply, during which Mountararat reorganised his clothes and put on his tie. If Tolloller wasn’t in he would probably just go home, because he didn’t really want to deal with his fellow man.

_Thomas: my dad dropped me off_

_Thomas: im in the common room_

Something was slightly off, but Mountararat couldn’t put his finger on what it was, or why. Rather than giving it further consideration, he tied back his hair, checked it briefly in the rear mirror, and got out of the car. So far, nobody had tried to have a go at him for having long hair, even though the rules dictated that boys had to have their hair shorter than the collar.

Tolloller had, now that he thought of it, let his hair get long – just longer than Mountararat’s was now. As far as Mountararat knew, though, he had just had it cut that weekend. Mountararat would have asked why, given that he had been equally as reticent as Mountararat, but he found that he really didn’t care.

Tolloller’s bag was in the hall when he reached the specific area of the school’s building set aside for only the Sixth Form students. Rather than questioning why this might be, Mountararat gave it a particularly cursory kick, because as much as he professed to find Tolloller annoying he did care about him, and picked it up.

He was accosted, before he could actually go into the common room, by Noah, one of the boys in the lower sixth form, coming out of the kitchen with what he could only describe as a mischievous look in his eyes. “You had your phone off all weekend, right?”

“Yes, I was visiting my aunt in Ireland with my parents.” Mountararat looked him suspiciously up and down, regretting not taking his phone with him. He had only left it to get some peace from Tolloller’s constant whining, but he couldn’t guess at what had happened. “…Why?” he asked, with deep suspicion.

“Oh, no reason.” Noah was grinning. Mountararat couldn’t be bothered to follow up on it.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, Thomas left his bag lying around in the hallway, so…” Mountararat turned and went to the common room with as much dignity as he could muster in a school uniform with his hair tied back with one of his sister’s pink hair ties.

“Tom, what in the _world_ have you been doing this weekend? You’ve –” Mountararat made a noise that would have sounded unnatural on anybody, but that sounded particularly alien coming from somebody who made a conscious effort to be as overwhelmingly serious and dignified as Mountararat. The reason was that Tolloller actually looked like he had just stopped crying. While Tolloller could be overly emotional, he would pretty much never let anybody see him upset, especially not Mountararat.

Rather than trying to explain what was amiss, Mountararat turned, walked out of the room before Tolloller could make any comment – because he imagined that a particularly maligned Tolloller could come up with something extremely unpleasant to say – counted to three in his head, and then walked back in. While he still looked miserable, Tolloller also looked utterly baffled.

“I’m every bit as weird as Isaac, I’m just better at pretending not to be.” Mountararat unceremoniously put Tolloller’s bag on the floor next to him, and sat down beside his friend on the sofa. He considered asking outright what was wrong, but decided that it seemed too remiss. But, that being said, Mountararat was nothing if not incredibly remiss. “I was going to try to say something nice,” he admitted, “but you honestly look like shit.”

Mountararat had expected some kind of complaint or anger, but instead Tolloller just slumped against his shoulder. Completely out of his depth and with no idea what to do any more, Mountararat put his arm around him. “Sorry. I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

“Well, you might as well have said it. I know I do.” Any other time, Mountararat would have kept pushing until he got a more entertaining reaction out of him than just resigned agreement, because Tolloller trying to be agreeable bored him. This didn’t seem like a great idea, in this case.

“I suppose I have to ask, then.” Mountararat rolled his eyes. “Why are you so upset?”

“I wouldn’t say _so_ upset,” Tolloller said, shrugging. “I’ve been in a bad way for a while.”

“And yet, I am right. Because I always am,” Mountararat said. Tolloller actually laughed. Mountararat very lightly squeezed his waist. “So, to put it in terms that won’t make you stroppy, what’s wrong?”

Tolloller moved away from him for a moment, and Mountararat assumed that he had offended or upset him, until he took his phone out of his bag. “Here,” he said, more darkly than sadly. “In the nicest way possible, you’re at least ninety percent of my impulse control.” He laughed, weakly, again.

_i don’t know why i’m making this post since i know what the reaction from everybody at school is going to be but I really can’t not any more so: i’m gay._

There were a couple of supportive comments from both Strephon and Phyllis, Tolloller’s uncle, his mother, Celia, and his father, and just a smiley face from Isaac, but otherwise the comments on what he’d said were particularly hateful. And mostly, they were from their classmates. Mountararat winced out of sympathy.

As much as Mountararat understood the sentiment of the post, and Tolloller’s feelings in general, he couldn’t help burying his head in his hands. There was really only one way to put it, but he didn’t want to say it. “You know you’re my best friend, right?” Mountararat asked, as a qualifier.

“Yes?” Tolloller sounded baffled.

“And that even though you do utterly ridiculous things and you’re an idiot I don’t _actually_ hate you at least fifty percent of the time, I just think you need to think before you do things?”

“George…”

“ _This is absolutely and with no exaggeration the most stupid thing that you have ever done!_ ” Mountararat hadn’t intended for his voice to end up pitching itself up an octave but apparently he was speaking in (rather squeaky) falsetto now. Irritated, he cleared his throat. Tolloller had turned around, his shoulders shaking. Assuming the worst, Mountararat put a hand on his back. “Shit. Thomas? Shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He then realised that Tolloller was laughing.

“I know, I know,” Tolloller giggled, turning and hugging Mountararat. Seeing that there was no actual unpleasantness, Mountararat shoved him off.

“So, has anybody said anything, or where you whimpering out of fear of the unknown?”

“Oh, _absolutely_ people have said things,” Tolloller growled. Mountararat was taken aback somewhat at the amount of venom in his tone, and decided that it would be best for his continued physical health to temporarily pull back the sarcasm.

“Sorry.” He paused and tried to think of something to say. Of course, _he_ had known for a couple of years, because Tolloller had been his closest and at times only friend, and vice versa, since they were about six. But otherwise, nobody knew – not even Isaac, and Isaac had a way of finding out everything. “First, what are your family…?”

“Not bothered.” Well, that was good, at least. “My mother _did_ throw a bit of a fit about how often I’ve slept over with you and Isaac, but otherwise they’re supportive and she came round to it when I pointed out how many times you’d shoved me off when I tried to hug you.”

“Can I guess that your father said something about teen pregnancies?” Mountararat asked, grinning.

Tolloller nodded. “Of course. It’s a bad joke, but I absolutely love it.”

“Good.” Mountararat nodded.

“And Celia now thinks I’m dating you, for some reason. As does Phyllis.”

“I assume Strephon has tried to set them straight?” Mountararat said, and then started giggling when he realised what he’d said. “Also, is Celia okay?”

“I… think she is?” Tolloller said, sounding a little less than convinced of what he was saying. “She said it was fine and that she was glad that I’ve come out but she’s not talked to me a whole lot since.”

Mountararat nodded. “And she didn’t know before?” Mountararat had no real comment on the morals of it, because he knew that Tolloller had known that he was gay beforehand. But, that said, nobody else was meant to, so it was somewhat understandable.

“No, she knew. I told her before we first got together,” Tolloller explained. “But just… I’m a little worried about her.” Tolloller cringed and looked away. “I really, _really_ didn’t want anybody to know. Because it _will_ get around to the teachers, and…” He made a face.

Mountararat slipped his hand around Tolloller’s wrist in sympathy. This – and the general reaction to Tolloller having come out – was why Mountararat himself hadn’t come out as bisexual. With this in mind, he could understand what was making Tolloller so nervous.

“If they try anything they’ll be in trouble, believe me,” Mountararat said quietly. They had about ten minutes before they needed to be at their first lesson, and Tolloller’s plan was just to avoid all interaction for the whole day. Fortunately, he was _very_ good at doing this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the skink story (with tolloller adopting New Skinks, not already owning a skink called daisy) is something that very nearly happened to me with some skinks at college, which needed a retirement home. note to the curious: i don't have any skinks, just five rats.
> 
> mountararat's cat is called arimanes, and his sister's cat is wellington (this is a reference to the sorcerer). tolloller's cats, because i am a Secret Homestuck, are nepeta and meulin. nepeta and meulin are both siamese cats, while arimanes and wellington are persians, because i think mountararat would be the sort of person to have a persian cat.
> 
> tolloller has skinks because i think that, if any character in iolanthe were to have the very particular and niche set of skills necessary to keep multiple breeds of skink, it would most likely be tolloller. don't ask why, because i honestly don't know.
> 
> also DON'T WORRY you'll meet the lord chancellor soon he's Upcoming, as is iolanthe.

“We should be writing essays.” Tolloller didn’t really mean it, of course, but he still said it. Just to be companionable. He was, rather than writing any essays, lying on his side on Mountararat’s bed, the top of his head barely touching Mountararat’s leg as his friend messed about with the pile of papers that had accumulated on the bed.

“We should,” Mountararat agreed, mostly because he had decided and learned a long time ago that just agreeing with Tolloller when he was drunk and said something stupid was probably the best bet. “But we are not doing.”

Despite the fact that he prided himself on being able to argue with literally anything that anybody said, especially if the person in question was George Mountararat, Tolloller found that he was unable to argue with that. This was partly because Mountararat was, as he distressingly frequently tended to be, right, but also partly because he was falling asleep.

Really, their weekly Bad Film – usually selected my Mountararat, who fancied himself as, amongst other things, something of a film buff – tended to just result in Tolloller watching the first twenty minutes or so while getting increasingly drunk, and then falling asleep about forty minutes in. The one exception to this had been Cool Cat Saves the Kids, which had felt like some sort of bad drug trip. Mountararat had found it hilarious, for what he described as “exactly the wrong reasons”.

Tolloller didn’t know what these reasons were. Either way, he didn’t particularly care, because Mountararat had spent at least twenty minutes of the film absently petting his hair, which was, regardless of his feelings towards Mountararat, nice.

“Anyway. School of Rock or… whatever fresh hell this is?” Mountararat asked, knocking Tolloller very gently on the side of the head with a DVD case. Tolloller lazily opened one eye, and cringed at the second offered DVD case. “Definitely not…” He squinted. “Nanalan?”

“The very same,” Mountararat said. “It’s a trippy Canadian puppet show but it’s quite cute.” He frowned down at Tolloller. “Apparently best watched when drunk.”

“I don’t think I’m drunk enough for that shit,” Tolloller mumbled, although he knew that this would probably open him up to Mountararat trying to get him more drunk, which he inevitably was going to do. “And–”

“And you just want to sleep on me for an hour and a half and hide from your mother. I know.” Mountararat carded his fingers absently through Tolloller’s hair, and then abruptly stopped when he realised what he was doing.

“I’m not hiding from her.” Tolloller said, although he said it without a great amount of feeling behind it. He brought his arm up to cover his face, and Mountararat got up to put on the film. “Have you actually watched this before?” Tolloller asked. “’Cuz I think I did in English in Year Eleven.”

“We were in the same class in English in Year Eleven.” Somehow. Mountararat was actually quite intelligent, but Tolloller was not. However, Mountararat had spent all of school consistently not applying his intelligence to anything except media studies. And the only reason he applied himself at that point was due to being an incredible film snob.

“And?”

“And I didn’t watch it in English in Year Eleven,” Mountararat said. Tolloller continued to look blank. “So, by that logic, you would also not have watched it in English in Year Eleven.”

“Oh.” Tolloller was clearly too drunk to grasp the concept, but he made a good show of pretending to understand. “Right.” He glanced up at Mountararat, who rolled his eyes. The subtleties of just about anything were usually lost on Tolloller; allowing him to drunk alcohol just worsened the matter.

“Are you going to actually watch this, or have you given up on that?” Mountararat asked, smiling wryly and reaching down to get them both another bottle of some sort of pretentious beer.

Mountararat pretended to like it but he didn’t actually like alcohol all that much. Tolloller pretended to enjoy it so that he could get drunk with somebody’s vague approval, it being the only thing that seemed to silence the constant humming of… well, something in his head.

Mountararat prodded Tolloller in the side of the head. “Because I recall that you’ve started going to sleep earlier and earlier.”

“It’s not my fault if your weird black and white French art films that neither of us understands and you wouldn’t watch with subtitles bores me to death,” Tolloller said, shrugging. Since he probably should have seen it coming, Mountararat wasn’t actually particularly offended by the insult. Tolloller fumbled around for a moment with the bottle opener on his keyring, before Mountararat took it off him.

“You’re right, but I’m not going to lower myself to saying so,” Mountararat said, somewhat sleepily, giving Tolloller an opened bottle of beer and his keys back. “Anyway, you will struggle to sleep through School of Rock. Very much.”

“It’s a loud film, then?” Tolloller asked.

Mountararat rolled his eyes. “It’s called _School of Rock_ ,” he said. “What were you expecting?”

“Geology?” Tolloller suggested.

“I am wasted on you.” Mountararat put his arm over Tolloller’s side and switched the film on.

As predicted, Tolloller fell asleep about twenty minutes into the film, at which point Mountararat’s elderly half-blind cat jumped up onto the bed and onto Tolloller’s legs. Ordinarily, Mountararat would have shooed the cat away because Tolloller’s cats (and his bizarre blue-tongued skink, which was called Daisy and equally terrified and fascinated Mountararat) would attack Tolloller when he got home for infidelity, but at this point he didn’t really care.

School of Rock was every bit as weird as Mountararat had expected it to be, but somehow Tolloller still managed to sleep through it. Mountararat made a mental note about half way through the film, when a particularly loud song was being played and Tolloller _still_ somehow seemed to be asleep, to found out what the Loudest Film Ever Made was and to have that as their next weekly bad film.

The first thing Tolloller said when Mountararat woke him up at around eleven was, “I’m thinking of adopting some new skinks.” Ordinarily, Mountararat would have been slightly confused, but Daisy the skink was as close as Mountararat imagined Tolloller would ever get to having a biological child.

“…Really?” Mountararat still couldn’t quite hide a little bit of confusion at the statement, because it _was_ an odd one.

Tolloller nodded as he combed through his unruly hair with his fingers for a moment, before giving up. He could comb it when he got home, if he didn’t stay overnight with Mountararat. “One of my friends is moving out of their flat, and he has a bonded pair of ocellated skinks that need rehoming.”

“I have no idea what an ocellated skink is,” Mountararat admitted, raising his eyebrows with mixed confusion and amusement, “but you have fun with that.” He patted Tolloller gently on the head, and received a contender for World’s Most Half-Hearted Glare in response.

“They’re snakes with legs pretty much,” Tolloller laughed, looking in his pockets to make sure Mountararat hadn’t taken his phone and oyster card while he’d been sleeping. “And these specific ones are very old and lumpy. I think the guy was saying that they’re nearly ten, something like that.”

“And what are they called?” Mountararat asked, as the cat came across to sit on his lap. He only asked because some of the skink-keeping people Tolloller knew gave their skinks rather amusing names.

“Jeremy and Jemimia,” Tolloller replied. “He got them from a university when they started attacking students but apparently they’ve chilled right out since.” He shrugged. “And now they need a retirement home. I still have some smaller tanks from when I first got Daisy, so…”

“I still think Daisy is terrifying,” Mountararat said, as the cat drooled all over his hand.

“Daisy is a beautiful child,” Tolloller huffed, genuinely affronted. “Anyway, she isn’t as bad as your awful cat.”

“This,” Mountararat said, picking up the cat, which did its best impression of a piece of limp spaghetti, “is the _better_ cat of the two. My sister’s cat is the truly awful cat.”

“That is true,” Tolloller conceded, as Mountararat set the cat down apologetically on the pillow that Tolloller had been lying on. “Your cat is a beacon of light compared to your sister’s cat.” Of course, he had forgotten the names of both cats. “But my cats are both considerably better. As is my skink.”

“Nothing named either _Nepeta_ or _Meulin_ can be anything but an absolutely top-notch cat,” Mountararat said, with extreme sarcasm. “I am, of course, the first to admit that.”

Tolloller laughed at the drooling cat on his pillow. “Your cat, on the other hand, could definitely be improved upon.” He scratched the cat gently under the chin even so, to show no hard feelings. He could never truly hate a cat with a face as squashed-looking as Mountararat’s. The cat purred, and drooled on him again as it did so.

“Can I assume that you have forgotten her name?” Mountararat asked, grinning.

“How could I ever forget a name as stupid as _Arimanes_?” Tolloller, to whom the name had only just occurred, asked, feigning offence. Arimanes’ ears pricked up at her name.

“Anyway,” Mountararat said, moving to a new topic with practiced ease. “Are you staying here tonight, or do you need a lift home?”

“I would go home, because I probably should, but I honestly can’t be bothered to move,” Tolloller admitted, shrugging. “Would you mind if I stayed for the night?”

“If I minded, I would have told you so, believe me.” Mountararat, being nothing but straightforward, wasn’t lying at all. If he hadn’t wanted Tolloller to stay overnight, then he would have woken him up as soon as the film was over and turfed him out at that point, rather than letting him stay and talk about skinks and insult his cat. “However, I _am_ kicking you out of my bed.”

“Oh, I know th–“ Tolloller shrieked in an extremely undignified way when Mountararat quite literally pitched him off the bed (an easy feat, given that Tolloller was particularly skinny and therefore easy to remove from any surfaces, and that Mountararat was used to physically removing him from these surfaces), picked up Arimanes, and turfed a pillow and a couple of blankets down onto him.

“Do you want the dreadful cat, or can she stay up here with me?” Mountararat asked, removing his shirt and putting on a battered hoodie while still sitting on the bed.

“You’re welcome to her.” Tolloller had pulled the blankets up over his head before he’d spoken, Mountararat noted with amusement. Arimanes made a noise that, while it resulted from her muzzle being essentially squashed flat, sounded remarkably human.


End file.
